Doctor Johnson and the Business World
Peter Mathias
NO economic historian should be arrogant enough to put pen to paper about the greatest literary figure in eighteenth-century England. Moreover, literary scholars, without much help from historians, have already found out virtually every fact which can possibly be known about one of the most explored persons in that century. Compared with what we know in detail about Dr. Johnson, such familiar figures of political and economic history as Chatham or James Watt fade into obscure silhouettes. Even the shadow of the great man spreads magic in its path. For example, when Johnson first went to London for a few months as a poor, unknown, unimportant scholar in 1737, his biographer writes: "One would like to know more about Johnson's first London landlord" and "What of "w. the cat"? Each cryptic phrase [in the account] remains a separate mystery." An economic historian offers no competition at such a level of detailed investigation. There can be no new primary sources for him which have not been exhaustively explored already. A long search through the eighteenth-century records of the excise authorities in the course of an investigation into the brewing industry failed to reveal his name in any negotiations concerning Thrale's brewery at Southwark. Recorded facts alone may be sifted into a different pattern. This is, perhaps, what Johnson meant when he said that, in writing history, "all the greatest powers of the human mind are quiescent." But he was never the one to condemn honest toil and he also commented, in another place, that "the writer is not wholly useless who merely diversifies the surface of knowledge and calls us back to a
